Rajaa Alsanea in her novel, Girls of Riyadh, writes of the way Saudi lovers overcome the restrictions on meeting alone. Of Sadeem and Firas she says:“For them, as for so many other lovers in the country, the telephone was the only outlet, practically, for them to express the love that brought them together. The telephone lines in Saudi Arabia are surely thicker and more abundant than elsewhere, since they must bear the heavy weight of all the whispered croonings lovers have to exchange and all their sighs and moans and kisses that they cannot, in the real world, enact—or that they do not want to enact due to the restrictions of custom and religion, that some of us truly respect and value.”
Source: Rajaa Alsanea, The Girls of Riyadh (London: Fig Tree, Penguin, 2007), 157.
A review of The Girls of Riyadh is posted at Reviewing Books and Movies.
Dr. Geoff Pound.
Image: “The telephone lines in Saudi Arabia are surely thicker and more abundant than elsewhere.”
